There are two ways to end up on the blacklist, either through direct channels or inadvertently. Currently, if I come across a website that I do not approve of either because I believe it is illegal or does not suit my ideological bent, I can make a complaint to the ACMA. In order to make a complaint, I must be an Australian resident or a company that carries on activities in Australia, provide the internet address and/or sufficient access details to enable ACMA to access the online content and provide reasons as to why I believe the online content is prohibited. The ACMA will then make a determination as to whether that site is added to the blacklist. It is not clear how the ACMA makes this determination. It has also been reported that other bodies such as filter software companies can also add websites to the blacklist. It is not clear how this is policed.

So how does one inadvertently end up on the list? Imagine that Big Buba from the Buba crime syndicate published a websites called FriendlyTours.com. However this is a front for an illegal website publishing unsavoury pictures. The site is found, a complaint made to ACMA and rightly added to the blacklist. A few weeks later, Big Buba closes down the site and moves to a new domain called BubaTours.com to try and keep ahead of the authorities. This site is also added to the blacklist and a few weeks later the site moves again and again.

Meanwhile, Jan who has been working for a large multi-national for 20 years is called into her manager’s office and told that she is being made redundant. With her large redundancy cheque, she decides to pursue her dream of running a tour business. She calls her business Friendly Tours and finds that the domain name is available. She registers the domain name and has a nice website built.

Jim, a dentist, decides to have a website built for his practice. His Internet Service Provider assigns his domain JimsDentistry.com to an IP address that was previously occupied by BubaTours.com. Both Jim and Jan are friends of mine. I offer to help them increase their Google rankings by linking to their sites through my website, my blog and my Facebook page.

A few weeks go by and Jim and Jan start getting emails from people saying they cannot access their websites. They don’t know why. They try to contact me for an explanation but cannot get hold of me. That is because I am in court being fined $11,000 a day for linking to a banned site. The people who emailed Jim and Jan are also in court facing jail terms of ten years for trying to access a site contained on the blacklist.

This blacklist is to form the backbone of the government’s mandatory filtering regime. The leaked list apparently contains 2,395 websites. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy wants to expand this to 10,000 websites. Will the ACMA be under pressure to find sites, any sites, to reach this number? The legitimacy of the blacklist will always be in question while owners of websites on the blacklist have no means of recourse especially if that site is legitimate.

Something I am curious about is whether this policy is unanimously supported or even popular among members of the ALP. If not, what are dissenting ALP members doing about it?

Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull gave a speech to the Australian Christian Lobby, evidently peppered with enough “marriage and families” references to suggest that the post-Howard Libs are still not completely above pandering to the fundagelicals. But he does deserve kudos for maintaining a firm stance on abortion and gay rights. On the latter, this gem:

“If you think about it, if you discriminate … against a gay couple, between two men living together, do you really think that they’re going to say ‘oh well, that’s no good, we’ll go off and get married to a woman’?” he asked the audience. (ABC News Online)

The Federal Government and Opposition have both given the thumbs down to calls to change or abandon the Lord’s Prayer recited at the beginning of each day of federal Parliament. [. . .]

A spokeswoman for Mr Rudd said the Prime minister viewed the prayer as an important tradition that should not be broken. [. . .]

Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace said Christianity had had a profound impact on shaping our laws, culture and democracy.

“It’s appropriate that we open parliaments with the Lord’s Prayer for its cultural and historic relevance,” he said. [. . .]

I have never yet heard a non-fallacious argument for the retention of this particular artefact of religious sectarianism in a constitutionally secular democracy, and as you can see, we are still waiting for one. Malcolm Turnbull claims that the opening prayer “is an important reminder of our shared humanity.” Whose shared humanity, Malcolm? Large numbers of humans don’t share your religious beliefs. Do they not count as human?

For the fundies, the issue is crystal-clear. The ACL’s Lyle Shelton opines: “we need to decide, do we appreciate the values of our society, (or) are we saying we want to reflect a different set of ethics in the way that we run our country?” Got it? Take God out of the parliament, and the result is fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes . . . The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! And whatever one thinks of the merits of Jim Wallace’s bald assertion that Christianity (whose Christianity? Jim’s Christianity?) had a role to play in “shaping our laws, culture and democracy,” why does it follow that Parliament should open with a Christian prayer? What does one thing have to do with another?

In a liberal democracy, the legislature should open to all believers and non-believers. Opening parliament with a Christian prayer grants a Most Favoured Religion (TM) status to a particular religion, and there is no place for that in a liberal democracy. Nor do I really see a need for the “moment of quiet reflection” proposed by Bob Brown. MPs sitting in nervous silence while their colleagues mutter incantations to their sky-daddy is a waste of taxpayer’s money. Just get on with it. Parliament House is not a church.

By the bye, homosexuality remains a crime throughout the Islamic world, and is punishable by death in Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen. It also incurs the death penalty in Bangladesh.

Props

Mr van Bigot [. . .] It's interesting the new morality of atheists. Commenting off topic is normal to humans. But atheists have such a rigid mind.
Your hypocrisy in accusing me of abuse is too breathtaking for words.
"Epic non sequitur." Your repetition is typical of the atheist misuse of Latin as being a magic language (also an RC delusion). Bless. (novparl, Five Public Opinions)

I’m bored waiting for signs of intelligence on this website. That’s justification enough to ignore it. Go back to your group hug now, and reassure yourselves that you’ve formed your views based on “reason” and not “faith”. (Alan, Five Public Opinions)

Hey, AV’s back. This is the infant who called me a nazi up above. Hi precious, welcome back. How was your kindy nap? Have you had your milk? ("Rebellion")

AV,
eloquence will not persuade me.
you may have a captive audience amongst your peers,but your words are like a clanging cymbal, a rather obnoxious noise after awhile. ("Saved Sinner", OzAtheist)

Cogitating about irrational, self-contradictory and anti-empirical intellectual dogmas such as falliblism does not interest me. Nor am I interested in the bigoted, selective applications of these nonsenses by one such as their zealous, close-minded ideologue. (Paul Robotham, A Churchless Faith)

a religious fundamentalist is by definition someone who is without doubt about their faith position and who spends a great deal of their time and energy promoting their faith by denouncing any person's contrary understandings of the universe.You meet this definition in with out any difficulty (Iain Hall, Malott's Blog)

Arthur reveals a little more of himself with each comment. Soon you’ll be confronted by the whole picture: Arthur uses everyone as a mirror for his own misplaced narcissism. ("Daniel", Old Lines From a Floating Life)